Software that doesn't assume a city
SideClick is local-first: the entire practice — notes, diary, billing, AI, exports — runs on your own machine with no connection at all. This page is the canonical account of what offline really covers.
- Offline scope
- The entire practice, AI included
- Licence checks
- Offline after one-time activation
- Sync
- Optional; catches up when the line does
- Backups
- Local .cfbak; relay copy on Practice
Everything works offline, permanently
Offline is not a degraded mode in SideClick; it is the architecture. Notes, scheduling, billing, outcome measures, exports and the AI assistant all run locally, so a practice with satellite internet that drops daily — or no connection at all — operates identically to one in the city.
The distinction matters because most "offline support" in practice software means read-only caching of a cloud product. Here the cloud is the optional part.
Even the licence respects the outage
After a one-time activation at install, licence verification happens on your machine. Our servers going down, your internet going down, or this company ceasing to exist — none of it can lock a clinician out of clinical records. The same posture extends to the AI: local inference means "no internet" costs you no capability at all.
How a low-connectivity practice actually runs
A two-clinician rural clinic syncs opportunistically: each machine works alone all day, and whenever the link is up for ten minutes, sync drains the queues and both machines converge. Town trips sync the laptop from the library WiFi. Nothing in the day waits on bars, and nothing is lost when they vanish mid-afternoon.
Backups without a datacentre
Rural practices can't treat 'the cloud has it' as a backup strategy, and with SideClick they don't need to: local encrypted .cfbak archives go to a drive in the safe on your schedule, and Practice editions add a relay-held encrypted copy that updates whenever connectivity allows. Both copies stay unreadable to anyone but the practice.
Questions, answered
What exactly works with no internet at all?
Everything clinical and administrative: notes, diary, billing, outcomes, kiosk, AI drafting, exports and backups. Sync and portal traffic queue until a connection exists — that is the complete list of what waits.
Do I need internet to install or license SideClick?
Once, at activation. After that the licence verifies offline; renewals are just installing a re-issued key when you next have a connection. A licensing-service outage on our side — or the company disappearing entirely — can never lock a rural practice out of its records.
Is the offline experience a reduced version of the product?
No — it is the product. Local-first means the full application runs against the database on your machine; connectivity only ever adds sync and portal delivery on top.
Does the AI need the cloud?
No. Inference runs on your own hardware, which is exactly why it keeps working where the connection doesn't.
How should a rural practice handle backups?
Local .cfbak archives on your own media as the baseline, rotated off-site on your schedule; Practice editions add an encrypted relay copy that syncs opportunistically. Restore works in every licence state.
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Full capability, no card required. Your data stays on your machine either way.
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